130 struggling with the worldTh e availability of surprise in the world and the human capacity to
cause surprise— even to ourselves— are integral to the struggle with the
world in all its forms, sacred and profane. Th e saving work of God is,
for the believer, the decisive surprise: no matter how much prefi gured
by prophecy, it represents a radical turn when it comes, persisting in
the endless surprise that the interaction of divine grace and human
striving makes possible. For the unbeliever, the ascent of mankind
manifests itself, among other marks, in the enhancement of vitality.
Th e ability to surprise, in the sense of acting outside the script of both
the social order and the individual character, forms part of what vital-
ity means.
Th e same principle continues in the internal or ga ni za tion of the mind:
the anti- modular and anti- formulaic aspect of the mind, that is to say the
mind as imagination, can prevail over the mind as modular and formu-
laic machine. It does not prevail as the result of any change in the physi-
cal constitution and function of the brain. It prevails as a result of cumu-
lative change in the or ga ni za tion of society and culture as well as in the
orientation of the person to his own character and his own life. To the
extent that society and culture are or ga nized to diminish the distance
between our context- preserving and our context- transforming moves
and the school exercises its prophetic mission of being the voice of the
future rather than the instrument of either the family or the state, the
mind as imagination wins power over the mind as machine.
Th is view of surprise as an attribute constitutive of our humanity is
foreign to the styles of causal and statistical determinism that inform
much of the established understanding of what science has discovered.
It is also alien to the spirit and practice of much of positive social sci-
ence. To its adversaries, this idea appears to be a form of irrationalism
when it is in fact a claim about our powers of imaginative insight and of
transformative action.
- History is open. Th e openness of history means that the course of
history does not conform to a script, not at least to a script that we are
powerless to reject or to rewrite.
Th e invocation of such a script is, however, more than a simple illu-
sion. It is the misunderstanding of a fact: the infl uence exerted by the
entrenched arrangements of society and culture. Th ey may be estab-